Families turn to Lully device to stop night terrors

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Elijah Ng,3, who suffers from night terrors, reads a book with mom Madeline Lee as they get ready for bedtime at his home in Santa Clara, Calif., on Monday, June 8, 2015. Lully gadget that is supposed to help children with night terrors by sending vibrations from under a mattress. (http://www.lullysleep.com) (Josie Lepe/Bay Area News Group)

Elijah Ng, 3, who suffers from night terrors, gets ready for bedtime at his home in Santa Clara, Calif., on Monday, June 8, 2015. Lully gadget that is supposed to help children with night terrors by sending vibrations from under a mattress. (http://www.lullysleep.com) (Josie Lepe/Bay Area News Group)

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Elijah Ng, 3, who suffers from night terrors, reads a book with dad Brian Ng as they get ready for bedtime at his home in Santa Clara , Calif., on Monday, June 8, 2015. Lully gadget that is supposed to help children with night terrors by sending vibrations from under a mattress. (http://www.lullysleep.com) (Josie Lepe/Bay Area News Group)

Elijah Ng, 3, who suffers from night terrors, poses for the camera as he gets ready for bed at his home in Santa Clara, Calif., on Monday, June 8, 2015. Lully gadget that is supposed to help children with night terrors by sending vibrations from under a mattress. (http://www.lullysleep.com) (Josie Lepe/Bay Area News Group)

A Lully device sits under the mattress of Elijah Ng, 3, in his family's home in Santa Clara, Calif., Monday, June 8, 2015. The Ngs are using a new gadget called Lully that is designed to help children, like their son, Elijah, 3, with night terrors by sending vibrations from under a mattress. (Patrick Tehan/Bay Area News Group)

Brian Ng, his wife, Madeline Lee and their son, Elijah Ng, 3, in their home in Santa Clara, Calif., Monday, June 8, 2015. They are using a new gadget called Lully that is designed to help children with night terrors by sending vibrations from under a mattress. (Patrick Tehan/Bay Area News Group)

The screaming and kicking usually started about two hours after Elijah Ng fell asleep, jolting his parents awake in the middle of the night.

Their 3-year-old son had night terrors, and no matter what they tried, Brian Ng and Madeline Lee’s son continued to scream in his sleep. The family rarely slept through an entire night.

That changed last spring when Elijah’s dad was online and spotted a vibrating white pod and app called Lully that is meant to stop the terrifying episodes.

“This one stood out to us,” Brian Ng said. “We’ve been struggling with it for his whole life really.”

At their Santa Clara home, the toddler’s bedroom is a sleeper’s paradise; layers of blinds block out sunlight, a stuffed sheep plays soothing nature sounds and the Lully system is tucked underneath a twin mattress.

About 20 minutes after Elijah falls asleep, the iOS app alerts his parents to turn on the Bluetooth-enabled pod by clicking a button on their phone. The white pod then vibrates for up to 3 minutes, keeping Elijah from entering a stage of “unhealthy deep sleep” when night terrors occur, using data entered about the child’s sleep patterns.

So far, they said, it’s worked.

“We always knock on wood because we don’t want to jinx it. I feel like this past week he’s slept through the night,” Madeline Lee said.

Between 1 percent and 6.5 percent of children suffer from night terrors, according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. Unlike nightmares, night terrors typically occur during the first part of the night and children don’t remember screaming and kicking in their sleep.

During a night terror, a person experiences a disruption of the brain waves and might be partially awake, said Dr. Shalini Paruthi, a pediatric sleep doctor at SSM Cardinal Glennon Children’s Medical Center in Missouri.

“So what can happen sometimes is you sort of get into no man’s land where your brain waves are completely asleep, but your muscle function comes back so these kids are able to scream and cry and kick,” she said. “They’re really hard to console when they’re having a night terror.”

Night terrors typically affect children from 2 years old up until their teenage years, she said, and may stem from sleep deprivation, sleep apnea, restless leg syndrome and other disorders. Lully is the first gadget Paruthi has heard of to help relieve the problem, but what it does is similar to another strategy used to treat night terrors, called scheduled awakening, where a child is gently woken up about a half an hour before the episodes are expected occur.

One of the Lully’s founders, Dr. Andy Rink, knows firsthand how night terrors can impact a family’s quality of sleep.

Growing up, his twin sister had night terrors that were so bad that the neighbors once threatened to call the police, his parents recalled, though Rink was too young to remember them. Years later, during a family vacation, he woke up to the terrifying screams of his nephew’s night terrors.

“That’s when I saw them in person for the first time and saw how disruptive they are. They woke up the entire house,” he said.

So in 2013, when Rink teamed up with Varun Boriah, an engineer, to study health problems as part of a fellowship at Stanford University’s Biodesign Program, night terrors came to mind.

The duo then branched out in 2014 to start the San Francisco company and tested Lully on 15 children between the ages of 2 and 10 who experienced night terrors.

Through the study, they found that Lully was able to prevent 90 percent of night terrors. “It actually seemed to improve their daytime functioning and it looked like they were actually sleeping better and getting more restful sleep,” he said. Rink recommends using the device, which is currently being revamped, every night for up to four weeks.

San Jose resident Elizabeth Cox said that she suffered from night terrors as a kid and now so do two of her children, Clark, 8, and Sylvia, 6.

They would scream and run throughout the house in the night. Sometimes they yelled “help” and other times it was just gibberish, Cox said.

“They’re looking at you. Their eyes are open. They’re screaming help me and it’s high-pitch terror. The first few times you’re terrified and you’re crying with them,” she said.

Both of her children also have sleep apnea, but even with the treatment of the disorder the night terrors still persisted, she said. The parents also tried waking up the children at a certain time, but it was hard to figure out what was the right time.

Lully helps determine the right time through the data they enter, and now her children’s night terrors only happen once a week instead of four times per week.

“It’s made them milder,” she said.

Eventually, Cox said that her night terrors went away in her teenage years. Fingers crossed, her children’s do too.

Queenie Wong covers social media businesses, including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, for The Mercury News. She grew up in Southern California and is a graduate of Washington and Lee University where she earned bachelor's degrees in journalism and studio art.

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